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Space photos of the day: Eclipse Edition

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In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, the sun is covered by the moon during the solar eclipse, in Easter Island, Chile, on July 11, 2010. Victor Rojas/Xinhua/AP

A triple exposure picture captures the lunar eclipse over the Saint Luca church on the southern hill of Bologna, Sept. 16. Astrologers have announced that this will be the last full eclipse of the moon before the new millennium. Vincenzo Pinto/Reuters

A seagull is silhouetted against the sun at dawn during a partial solar eclipse on Guadalmar beach in Malaga Jan. 4. The partial eclipse will be visible near sunrise over most of Europe and northeastern Asia.Jon Nazca/Reuters

Tourists watch the sun being blocked by the moon during a solar eclipse in the Australian outback town of Lyndhurst, located around 427 miles north of Adelaide in this Dec. 4 photo. Australia's military has lost its X-Files, detailing sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, across the country, a newspaper report said on June 7. David Gray/Reuters

The International Space Station was in position to view the umbral (ground) shadow cast by the moon as it moved between Earth and the sun during a solar eclipse on March 29, 2006. This astronaut image captures the umbral shadow across southern Turkey, northern Cyprus and the Mediterranean Sea. NASA

At first glance, Jupiter looks like it has a mild case of the measles. Five spots - one colored white, one blue, and three black are scattered across the upper half of the planet. Closer inspection by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals that these spots are actually a rare alignment of three of Jupiter's largest moons - Io, Ganymede, and Callisto - across the planet's face. In this image, the telltale signatures of this alignment are the shadows [the three black circles] cast by the moons.NASA

The Sun's corona stretches far beyond the dense, inner corona seen in x-rays and ultraviolet light, and beyond the limits of what we normally see in the dark sky of a total solar eclipse. Its farthest reaches are delineated by tapered streamers that stretch into interplanetary space, extending the domain of our nearest star much farther than its visible disk. We see the outer corona briefly at total eclipses of the Sun, where it appears white and delicate against the starry background of a temporarily darkened, daytime sky. NASA

On December 3, 2002, people in Australia received a rare 32-second celestial show as the moon completely obscured the sun, creating a ring of light. Solar eclipses provide experts an opportunity to study the sun's outer atmosphere, called the corona. This total eclipse was the first to cover Australian shores since 1976.NASA/ESA

International Space Station crew members were able to document a rare occurrence. The dark area near the center of the frame is actually a shadow cast by the moon during the total solar eclipse of Dec. 4, 2002. The shadow obscures an area of cloud cover. The Station, with three Expedition Six crew members aboard, was over the Indian Ocean at the time of the eclipse.NASA

This transit of the moon across the sun on Feb. 25, 2007, could not be seen from Earth. This sight was visible only from the STEREO-B spacecraft in its orbit about the sun, trailing behind the Earth. NASA's STEREO mission consists of two spacecraft launched in October 2006 to study solar storms. When STEREO-B captured this image, it was about one million miles from the Earth. That's about 4.4 times farther away from the moon than we are on Earth. As a result, the moon appeared about 4.4 times smaller than what we are used to.NASA

NASA's Terra satellite was rounding the top of the globe, making its way from the eastern tip of Siberia and across the Arctic Ocean towards northern Norway and northwest Russia, when it captured this unique view of a total solar eclipse on Aug. 1, 2008. The circular disk of the Moon casts an oval-shaped shadow across the left edge of this image. In the region of totality, where the Moon entirely obscures the Sun, the shadow is complete.Holli Riebeek, NASA's Earth Observatory

This image shows the Aug. 1, 2008, solar eclipse at the point of totality, when the moon completely blocks out the body of the sun, revealing the normally hidden, halo-like corona. The Exploratorium/NASA

Photographer David Guerra, of Edinburg, Texas, captured this stunning view of a partial solar eclipse.NASA

This is one of a series of photographs of the eclipse of the Sun which was taken from the Apollo 12 spacecraft during its transearth journey home from the Moon. This view was created when the Earth moved directly between the Sun and the Apollo 12 spacecraft.NASA